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It’s been a long day of writing lyrics, and an even longer night of editing said song lyrics, and Yoongi’s studio is packed with evidence of their writing session – half-full coffee cups and fifty-year-old books with the spines cracked open to potential quotes to reference. It’s late enough now to be early, and Namjoon’s just in the middle of lining up a photo of Yoongi sleeping in his chair, head tilted back and mouth slightly open, when his phone buzzes with the notification of a photo memory.
According to his phone, it’s the ten year anniversary of the day he had taken the photo that’s popped up in the notification – it’s pretty surprising that his phone can pull data from that far back, but it’s even more surprising that the photo is almost identical to the one he was in the middle of taking.
Namjoon is suddenly flooded with the accompanying memory of this photograph. It had been during their very first all night writing session, and Namjoon had snapped the photo partly to boast to their fellow trainees about how hard he and Yoongi had been working, but mostly because he’d known, even then, young, brash, and hot-headed as he’d been, that Yoongi was trusting him with something.
Yoongi looks so young in the photo. It’s not as though he looks old now, not at all, but in the decade-old photo everything – from the grainy texture of the photo, the tiny room he’s sitting in, to the big clothes and bigger beanie swamping him – is serving to make him look younger than Namjoon remembers him ever being.
He takes a screenshot of the notification, opens his camera app, quickly snaps a photo of Yoongi as he is right now, and then puts a hand on his shoulder. “Hyung, you’ll hurt your neck sleeping like that.”
Yoongi closes his mouth, licks his lips, then opens an eye. “How long’ve I been asleep?”
“Well, looking at these photos, about ten years,” Namjoon teases, showing him a comparison of the screenshot and the new, updated photo; Yoongi opens his other eye to get a better look, then laughs.
“That is a child, I don’t know him,” he says, shuffling to correct his posture. “That was after our first all night song writing session, right?”
“You remember?”
“Course I do,” Yoongi replies, stretching his neck until it cracks. “I would say I remember every time we’ve written a song together, but that’d be an outright lie – I remember that time, though.” He nods at Namjoon’s phone. “That was around the time where we’d just stopped throwing laundry at one another, so it felt like a breakthrough, you know?”
Namjoon hums in agreement, flicking back and forth between the two pictures. It’s not just Yoongi’s pose that’s the same, but seemingly Namjoon’s, too. Sat on Yoongi’s left, the Namjoon taking both photos is clearly leaning towards Yoongi, arms outstretched to take the photo without getting so close as to disturb him.
They’re both, to Namjoon at least, pretty revealing about Namjoon’s feelings towards Yoongi, but whereas the Namjoon of the past would have scoffed, rolled his eyes, blustered if questioned about the true nature of his feelings, the Namjoon of the present looks at Yoongi, smiles, and says, “Hey. I love you.”
Yoongi blinks at him, slow and a little bit sleepy, a flutter of his eyelashes as he just looks at Namjoon. “What brought this on?” He says eventually.
Namjoon shrugs, still smiling. “Getting sappy in my old age, I suppose.”
Yoongi huffs a laugh through his nose, hooks his foot around the spoke of Namjoon’s office chair, and pulls him closer. “Well, I love you, too.” He cups his hand on Namjoon’s jaw, thumb brushing his cheekbone as he leans in for a kiss. Kissing Yoongi, even after all these years, is affectionate and fun; when Namjoon splays his own hand against Yoongi’s side, feels his ribs rise and fall with his breaths, Yoongi presses another quick peck on Namjoon’s lips, then one on his forehead. “Okay,” he says, pulling away to sit back in his own chair, keeping his foot hooked around Namjoon’s chair. “Now that I’m well rested-”
“You weren’t actually asleep for a decade,” Namjoon replies. “It was two minutes, max.”
“Now that I’m the most rested I’ve ever been in my life,” Yoongi insists. “Pass me that book, I think I can make this verse work.” Namjoon dutifully hands over the book Yoongi’s waggling his hand towards. “I think our problem is we’re trying to write about love too broadly, when we’ve always been at our best, lyrically, when we’re writing about specifics.” Holding the book open with one hand, he starts scribbling something across his notepad, his handwriting veering in wild, slanted lines, and then he pushes the page over to Namjoon with a raised eyebrow.
“Yeah, these’re better, I think,” Namjoon says, eyeing the written lines with a critical eye. The lyrics are personal without being too revealing, referencing moments in their own relationship that Namjoon could pick out a mile away with language too obscure for anyone outside of their inner circle to get. They’re pretty, too; Namjoon can practically hear the string instrumental Yoongi will likely produce to accompany the words he’s written.
When he looks up, Yoongi’s grinning at him toothily. “What?” He asks, pushing the notepad back over.
“That day you took that photo,” Yoongi says, glancing at Namjoon’s phone. “When we did that all night writing session for the first time?” Namjoon hums questioningly. “That’s more or less what you said when you saw the lyrics I wrote.”
“No kidding?” Namjoon asks, trying to remember. Most of his memories of that night are the way he’d felt, working so closely and so in sync with Yoongi for the first time – that feeling of finding a piece of his own soul out in the wild.
“Well, it was more like-” He slouches in his seat, folds his arms, and tosses his head to the side, nose high in the air. “‘Yeah, hyung, these are fine, whatever’,” he says, putting on a grouchy, gruff voice. He straightens up with another smile. “But I got the gist.” Namjoon thinks about that boy in the old photo, and the boy behind the camera – both of them more similar than they realised at the time, both running full-throttle towards similar goals, both of them with so much career, relationship, and personal development ahead of them. He reaches his hand out and takes up Yoongi’s. It’s his writing hand, so he’ll probably pretend to be cross about it in a minute, but for now he smiles, pleased, down at the notepad. “Wow, that old photo got you really sappy, huh?”
“Yeah,” Namjoon says, looking over at Yoongi’s lyrics and thinking of the two photos, simultaneously identical and distinct. “I suppose it did.”